


Putting the Gentle Queen Back Into Her Own Narrative, A Suggestion In Ten Parts

by Quecksilver_Eyes



Series: Narnia Musings [43]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, a strongly worded letter to one Clive Staples Lewis, aka this is set post the last battle, an unchallenged statement by someone, give her a voice, in which susan tells her own story, instead of letting our last impression of her be, post 1949, put this girl back into her own narrative, who didn't know nor understood her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:29:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21563011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: I am the only one of us still standing, I am the only one of us who sits on this bench, who watches as they are all lowered into the ground in their best Sunday dress. Maybe I’m the only one who can see that none of them would have wanted to be buried like this. Maybe I look at my baby sister, the way she’s crammed into a dress with that collar she’d pull from her throat, groaning. And I see a lion cub curled up in the coffin, pressed against the satin, against the blood-red of it all. Maybe I wish there was a cherry tree to bury her under.
Relationships: Aslan & Susan Pevensie, Edmund Pevensie & Lucy Pevensie & Peter Pevensie & Susan Pevensie
Series: Narnia Musings [43]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1714795
Comments: 14
Kudos: 79





	Putting the Gentle Queen Back Into Her Own Narrative, A Suggestion In Ten Parts

**I.** I survived.

I survived Narnia, I survived the war, I survived being twelve and twenty-seven all at once. I survived. I didn’t mount a train I knew was never going to take me back home.

I said good-bye to my siblings, who, by then, hated me.

Or maybe didn’t hate me, maybe they were just annoyed with me, maybe – maybe I’d just lied to them too much.

Maybe I just told them that our memories weren’t real one too many times. Maybe I looked at Lucy and couldn’t see anything but a lion in the way she looked at me, maybe I looked at Edmund and couldn’t distinguish his eyes from the eyes I remember.

Maybe I looked at Peter.

At his trembling hands. Maybe I couldn’t bring myself to hug any of them.

Maybe I couldn’t bring myself to say good-bye.

**II.** Maybe – maybe, sometimes, I didn’t recognise my parents the way I should have. Maybe sometimes, I woke up in this damp, cold, sunless world, and couldn’t remember who I was. Maybe sometimes: I looked at my baby sister, and I looked at my baby brother and I saw; nothing. Maybe sometimes they fled into a world I couldn’t follow them into, maybe sometimes I couldn’t remember it at all.

Maybe sometimes I did, truly, forget.

**III.** Maybe: I remembered. Maybe I remembered a lion and I remembered the sun and I remembered the winter and I remembered the Talking Beasts and I remembered Tumnus and I remembered everything. Maybe sometimes I thought they were only dreams. Maybe sometimes I thought they work the way memories do; where, if you just tell yourself something long enough, your brain will create a memory for you. Did you notice? Tell a story often enough and it will change, and your memory will change to accommodate it. Or maybe that’s just me.

Maybe I just talked myself into it long enough. Maybe, when I was twelve, or twenty-seven, or maybe really just twelve years old, I looked into the mirror, at my curled hair, at the gap between my teeth; I looked at myself, and I saw: nothing. I couldn’t see the woman I thought – I knew – I’d grown into. I couldn’t see the way my hair curls naturally, couldn’t watch the way my eyes would glow. Maybe I didn’t see myself or even a girl, maybe I just saw a child; starving.

**III. a)** Maybe sometimes I had phantom pains in limbs that I suddenly could feel again. Maybe sometimes I imagined I’d lost them – and, conversely, imagined I never did.

**IV.** I survived.

I am the only one of us still standing, I am the only one of us who sits on this bench, who watches as they are all lowered into the ground in their best Sunday dress. Maybe I’m the only one who can see that none of them would have wanted to be buried like this. Maybe I look at my baby sister, the way she’s crammed into a dress with that collar she’d pull from her throat, groaning. And I see a lion cub curled up in the coffin, pressed against the satin, against the blood-red of it all. Maybe I wish there was a cherry tree to bury her under.

Maybe I look at my baby brother and miss the way his eyes would look, his suit is crinkled, his legs – his arms – all gangly things he’d not yet grown into. Maybe I wish there was a forest to carry him into, dryads in whose care to let him be buried.

Maybe I look at my eldest brother. Maybe I look at this boy I’d known all my life, with his blond hair and his hands; still. Still and unmoving, not a wrinkle in his suit, not a smile on his face. Maybe I look at this boy and I see; a beard, and I see; a tremor and I see; a smile and I see; a crown.

Maybe I just wanted to see them. Maybe I just wish that I had had a say in any of this, maybe I just wish that I could have picked the coffins, that I could have picked the clothes, that I could have picked the burial.

But I am twenty-one, see (or, perhaps, thirty-six, heaving). I am grieving.

**V.** There wasn’t a day I didn’t cry. There wasn’t a moment I didn’t hear the phantom memories of my siblings tumbling across the floor.

So Aunt Alberta did everything.

She wouldn’t let my cousin be buried with all the rest of them, see, and I wondered if she looked at her sister and felt the way I did when I looked at mine.

But the burial was the first time I didn’t cry since the telegram told me of bodies dispersed along train tracks. I put on lipstick, and nylons, and dresses, and petticoats, and a girdle and I smiled.

**VI.** My life is built on the back of survival. I went overseas because I couldn’t stand the dampness anymore. Perhaps that makes me a coward. Perhaps it makes me not a friend, perhaps it makes me unworthy in the lion’s eyes, perhaps it makes me a traitor the way my nine year old baby brother was when a woman fed him sweets and enchantments.

Maybe I betrayed them all by living; by surviving. Maybe, when I die, I won’t see them again. Maybe when I die I will – and the lion will stand there, and it will tell me to turn around, will tell me that there is no place in this country for Queens who grew up, for Queens who adapted, for Queens who survived.

**VII.** Perhaps then, finally, I can look at the lion and tell it what I think of its inaction in the face of genocide, its inaction in the face of its people starving and dying away. Maybe then I can tell it that a nine year old boy who misses his parents like the food he’s starving for, who hasn’t had sweets in a year didn’t deserve to be called a traitor because he was upset and hurt and a Witch spelled him.

**VIII.** Perhaps I will not say anything at all. Perhaps I will look at this lion and I will not recognise it, the way I go to the zoo and every time I see a lion I feel the urge to bow.

Perhaps my siblings will still hate me, will still be annoyed, will still be upset. Perhaps I’ve lied to them one too many times.

**IX.** I exist in this world. I have a life and I refuse to end it after fifteen years in another world, after nine years in this one. I’ve not lived yet.

**X.** I will live.

I just wish I’d hugged my siblings good-bye.


End file.
